My goal is lucidity. If your comments clarify mine, so much the better. If you are informed or enlightened or amused or persuaded, so much the better….Rick Subber

Saturday, September 5, 2015

Beef and poop, an American story

Your burger can bite you.

Try not to think about ordering your burger “rare.”

Here’s the sad but true backstory: the folks at Consumer
Reports visited 103 stores in 26 cities and bought 458 pounds of ground beef.
Pound by pound, they tested the raw meat for contamination.

“All 458 pounds of beef we examined contained bacteria that
signified fecal contamination” is the finding reported by The New York Times
Daily Digest.

Ground beef storage unit

Try saying it this way: all of the meat had vestigial poop
in it. Salmonella was detected in 1 per cent of the samples.

The Department of Agriculture interpreted the report as
“good news” because no bad E. coli had been found. The North American Meat
Institute pointed out that the occurrences of bacteria were “far below U. S. D.
A performance standards.”

Note that the federal standard is that it’s OK to have
salmonella in up to 7.5 percent of meat samples. I guess the folks at
Agriculture are happily convinced that every consumer handles raw meat in
sterile conditions from start to finish, and fully cooks all portions of meat
before the kids or Gramma eat anything.